CaseCamp Ottawa: Feed Your Marketing Team

byaleconNovember 9, 2006

I’ve been meaning to write down my thoughts about Ottawa’s CaseCamp for the last couple of days, and somehow with all the activity in my day, it’s been impossible.Â Â Joe Thornley has already written up a good synopsis, though, including a nice piece about my presentation (thank you Joe!).Â And,Â ofÂ course,Â the CaseCamp WikiÂ has promised to put theÂ presentations online.Â

I want to write a littleÂ about Mitch Brisebois’ Software As A Service (SaaS)Â presentation. Every time I see MitchÂ speak, he blows me away.Â He’s a passionate advocate for design, and the places that design can impact.Â Monday’s presentation was no exception.

Mitch’s background is inÂ UI design, psychology, and IP development.Â A former Norteler, he’s now working for TrueContext.Â And since he was speaking to a crowd of marketing folks, he gave us a pitch on how design and SaaS could benefit marketing.Â His contention: you canÂ feed marketing right into your product.Â Here’s his 8 step process:

1 – feed the loyalty.Â You have a problem when yourÂ “customer satisfaction numbers suck”Â and your product is actively working.Â That’s when you loseÂ customers.Â Even if the customer experience is just uneventful, they stay, but your customer base won’t grow.Â As a designer and marketer you need to be delighting customers to get them out evangelizing your product.Â

3. – feed the tribe.Â SaaS is a great tool for long tail, and viral plays.Â Make your system customizable, and programmable so that others can mash it up.Â Get the buzz going.Â

4. feed the family.Â Along the same idea as feeding the tribe, get multiple people in the same organization using your product. It’s that much harder to switch if the corporate data is all in one place.

5. feed the KoS.Â You’re collecting information all the time — how many users, etc.Â Monster is a great example.Â They collect metrics, and sell them back to their customers.Â

6. feed the collector.Â Everyone has a collector mentality.Â Use your SaaS UI to show peopleÂ “this is what you’ve got”, and the blank spacesÂ are “this is what you could get”.Â BuildÂ recommendation engines right into your product, and always have a premium service.Â Premium customers are often customers who just like having… bragging rights.Â

7. feed the periphery.Â VC’s always tell you to focus on core value;Â what’s yourÂ elevator pitch, etc.Â But once you have the customer, what else can you sell them on?

8. feed the magic. What’s the thing which gets people talking?Â The life-changing function?Â Sometimes it’s as simple as a bit of personalization.Â

Net net: With SaaS it’s easy to build something into the product that helps marketing.Â And, it’s easy to use marketing to drive the product.